Arts

Book Reviews

4:29 am

Sun September 14, 2014

The recent wave of dystopian novels — okay, let's call it a glut — has focused attention on all kinds of Earth-threatening ills, from climate change to genetically modified food. The plight of student-loan debtors and struggling academics, however, hasn't usually topped that list. Which is partly what makes Darin Bradley's latest novel, Chimpanzee, so fascinating, flaws and all.

Author Margaret Atwood is prolific, beloved and extraordinarily accomplished. In addition to best-selling novels like The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin, she's penned poems, short stories, children's books, essays and works that defy classification.

But her fans will have to wait a long, long time for one particular piece of writing. She's working on a book that nobody will read for a hundred years — part of an art project that's going to require some special archival paper, as she explains to NPR's Arun Rath.

"That thud — that noise of the girl's body hitting laminate — would play over and over again in my mind, dull thud after dull thud," she writes in her new book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory. She was 8, in a shopping mall in her home state, sunny Hawaii. The girl fell from a balcony. "Today, the thuds might be called a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, but back then the noises were just the drumbeat of my childhood."

Wendy Davis, the Democratic candidate for the governor of Texas, came to the attention of most Americans outside Texas when, as state senator, she filibustered a highly restrictive abortion bill for 11 straight hours.

Now Davis is making headlines for her newly released memoir, Forgetting to Be Afraid. In the book, Davis revealed for the first time that she had two abortions herself. She also details her gritty and sometimes unhappy life growing up, first in Rhode Island and then Texas, Oklahoma and California.

Book Reviews

9:03 am

Sat September 13, 2014

It's a bright cool day in September and the books now number 13. Kim Harrison has concluded her long-running Hollows series, the 10-year-anniversary of which I marked back in April, and I am bereft. In The Witch With No Name, Rachel Morgan, Ivy Tamwood and Jenks the pixy have their last string of adventures together in a modern-day Cincinnati riddled with elves, witches, vampires living and undead, werewolves, fairies and demons, in a rollercoaster ride of interlocking shenanigans that left me a little breathless.

Book Reviews

4:36 am

Sat September 13, 2014

One measure of a fine writer is the ability to master new tricks. Joseph O'Neill's new novel, The Dog, is a different animal (so to speak) from Netherland, his remarkable PEN/Faulkner Award-winner about a Dutch financial analyst adrift in New York in the aftermath of 9/11. Though both involve romantic estrangement in a globalized but alienating world, The Dog focuses more narrowly — and sometimes claustrophobically — on one man's hopeless, deluded efforts to live blamelessly in a distressingly mean-spirited, soulless society.

Fri September 12, 2014

In my 20s I was living in London, and dating a Scotsman. A friend pulled me aside. "Read The Crow Road by Iain Banks," he told me. "It's the story of our childhood. Read this and you'll understand us."

The Crow Road is a darkly witty coming-of-age novel. It's set in the early '90s in a mostly realistic Scotland.

Television

3:25 pm

Fri September 12, 2014

Saturday Night Live is bringing a new face to the Weekend Update chair — comedian and former SNL writer, Michael Che. He's a fake news expert from his previous gig as a The Daily Show correspondent. Che spoke to Audie Cornish in June about his fast rise as a stand-up comedian and his love for uncomfortable humor.

Fri September 12, 2014

Tsai Ming-liang's Stray Dogs caps off with two shots, each over ten minutes long, though I doubt that will make the movie any easier to sell, even in a culture obsessed with long takes. The episode-capping tracking shot in True Detective or the opening 17 minutes of Gravity — those celebrated scenes awed us with movement. In his two final shots, Tsai lulls us with stillness.

Movie Reviews

10:03 am

Fri September 12, 2014

Working back through a raft of bad-seed twins to 1962's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? the sibling drama has, with few exceptions, been ignored or pathologized to death in movies. I see why: no prospects for sex, unless we're talking incest. Yet that relationship, with all its potent friction of solidarity and competition, comes stuffed with dramatic potential that the fairly new director Craig Johnson means to mine in The Skeleton Twins, an intermittently absorbing dramedy about a brother and sister who have reached adulthood in years, if not in maturity.

Roots Music

9:10 am

Fri September 12, 2014

Friday night (9/12) at Donnie's in Springfield will kick off The American Music Show. It's a festival that's making a comeback this year. Bands include regional favorites The Bottle Rockets, and Brooklyn rock/indie duo The Mastersons, who regularly serve as backup band members for Steve Earle. The two-day event highlights roots/Americana music. We spoke with booker Sean Burns about it - he tells us about bringing under-appreciated, talented musicians to town.

Code Switch

8:39 am

Fri September 12, 2014

To commemorate New York Fashion Week, we're looking at some current perspectives on fashion and beauty. On Thursday, we examined a fashion that many regard as "dangerous" and deplorable. Today, contributor Erika Nicole Kendall looks at a phenomenon more and more are trying to claim.